


A Stitch in Time

by Captain America (HisMightyShield)



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Watson and Holmes (Comics)
Genre: Blood, Blood and Injury, First Aid, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-31
Updated: 2015-05-31
Packaged: 2018-04-02 03:10:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4043593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HisMightyShield/pseuds/Captain%20America
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Holmes returns with an injury & a solution. Watson, as always, helps with both.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Stitch in Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sanguinity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanguinity/gifts).



> There is a very special place in my heart for the Watson & Holmes comic. I was a Kickstarter supporter, so I sort of had a personal investment. But honestly, I’ve always really liked the Holmes/Watson dynamic presented in the comic. It really puts them on equal ground and emphasises how their individual strengths work to complement each other. They truly are a team, and I wanted to write a scene that reflects the importance of their reliance. 
> 
> I also think that the Watson & Holmes comic rejects a lot of the the typical tropes associated with Holmes, his genius and his goals, so I wanted to accent that a little further, while also touching on how important Watson is to Sherlock. 
> 
> Personally, I think the title of the comic is important, because I really think that this series does put Watson first, he’s where a lot more of the focus is, and that’s one of the things I love most of all about the comic.

Darkness was a strange concept. The word itself was simple enough, but it held many connotations, and Holmes was positive that through his great number of cases, he’d encountered them all. Lightless rooms, ignorance, even his own dangerous thoughts, they were all a sort of _darkness_ in their own right. It made a great deal of sense, considering his role as a private investigator was often simply to shed light where it was needed. To uncover deeply buried truths or cut through the fog of criminal lies and deeds, all in the pursuit of justice. But over the past few days, Holmes found himself facing a very particular and peculiar sort of _dark_ that he’d never seen before. Thus far, the motives of the criminals that he and Watson had managed to work together to put away had been rudimentary, at best. Fame or recognition, money - coveted out of need or greed. But the case he was devoted to now, a string of murders, seemingly random and startlingly grotesque, had introduced Holmes to the kind of criminal who committed malice not for gain, but for sport. Though, with the evidence that Sherlock now held in his possession, the criminal’s freedom to do wrong would soon end. 

The red scarf, tied tightly around the sleeve of his white coat, had a dual purpose. It served to staunch the bleeding and disguise the blood that had already managed to seep through the fabric. The gash across the side of Sherlock’s forearm was not as deep or dangerous as it was irritating. But, the reward for (and necessity of) the injury far outweighed the cost of the pain. But that did not change the fact that it was just best to avoid Mrs. Hudson’s concerns, if possible, and Holmes was quite relieved when he managed to slip past her warm greetings and up the stairs to his Harlem apartment without raising any suspicions. It was another small victory, but it hardly marked the end of Sherlock's already long and gruelling evening. 

A man’s innocence needed to be proven and there was still a murderer to be apprehended. But conducting an interrogation (lieutenant permitting) with an injury was unwise by just about anyone’s standards, including his own. Therefore, a trip back to the apartment to see Jon was needed. A few moments of quick patchwork and he would be fighting fit and ready to get back into the line of duty. 

Before opening the door that led to the series of rooms he and Watson shared, Holmes paused and lifted his arm to examine the scarf. He was stalling, just for as long as it took to order his thoughts. 

What drove Holmes, without question, was an insatiable need to know why a crime was committed. He never pulled on a string just for the sake of pulling, but to see where it _led_. However, finding a solution without reason was as unsatisfying as bread without butter. It was all sustenance, and no reward. But there was little point in chasing what wasn’t there, and he knew a dead end when he encountered it. So, instead of letting his mind wander, he set it to a problem he could fix, and worked the knot in the fabric around his arm loose as he shouldered open the door and stepped into 221B Baker Street. 

“Watson?” 

Having a few hours still to spare before he was due to report at Covenant for his next shift, Jon Watson was stretched out on the sofa, halfway between reading yesterday’s newspaper and a nap. Sherlock watched Jon lean to his left as he entered the apartment. Holmes noticed that the second Watson saw the fresh stain on his sleeve, he was on his feet; his drowsiness shaken off like water from the coat of a wet dog. 

“Jesus, Holmes, the hell happened to you?” He crossed the floor in a couple strides and bent slightly for a quick look at Sherlock’s arm, before he gestured for the detective to shed his layers and reveal the injury. “What have you been doing?” 

Holmes slowly slipped out of his jacket, letting it fall in a heap by the litter of shoes at the door, and surrendered his arm to Watson so the other man could carefully tug up the fabric of his shirt and survey the damage. He offered no explanation, in fact, he didn’t speak at all. Instead, he simply admired the other man as he assessed the state of his arm and straightened up to guide Sherlock to their kitchen table. 

“We’re gonna need to stitch that,” Watson said once Holmes was seated, and he disappeared back to his bedroom to find his bag of medical and first aid supplies. 

Left alone, Holmes stretched his arm out across the flat surface of the table, splaying his fingers as he waited for Watson to return. He knew, by now, that part of the reason their partnership had been so successful thus far hung upon the fact that Watson admired his work. He enjoyed watching, and assisting Holmes as he put the pieces together through the powers of observation and sense. But Sherlock had no arrogance when it came to what he was able to do. He knew that he was skilled; that his strengths were unique, but when he was with Jon, he never considered himself to be the only genius in the room. 

Much like darkness, _intelligence_ was an equally multifaceted concept. While Holmes might be able to suss out meaning in the seemingly mundane, he weighed his abilities as no more or less important than Jon’s. More than once, Jon’s military training had spared their necks, and his medical background had saved more lives than just their own. In Watson, Sherlock found a man who was as motivated to find truths and shed light on the shadowy corners of crime as he was. Perhaps, Holmes wondered, Jon was driven to find answers out of some unwavering sense of duty. He had served his country for three terms in Afghanistan. Or perhaps what kept him going was far more personal. Perhaps Jon sought for others what he feared to seek for himself. Holmes knew about the nightmares, knew they were the result of some of the relentless violence he had witnessed overseas, but he’d never attempted to pry into the man’s privacy or his demons. It was a courtesy he afforded his friend because it had been returned in kind. Jon had moved into Baker Street without asking too many questions, after all, he’d sunk into their partnership as willingly as Holmes had offered it. And that, to Sherlock, made Watson more than just intelligent. It made him important. 

Jon emerged from the bedroom with his kit in tow, and pulled a kitchen chair up perpendicular to where Sherlock sat, so he could begin the process of carefully cleaning the wound to prepare it for stitches. While he was almost entirely focused on his work, he did send a few meaningful glances in Sherlock’s direction. But, when it became clear that a subtle approach wasn’t enough to solicit a response from the detective, he turned to his words. 

“Are you gonna tell me what happened, Holmes, or do you want me to start guessing?”

“I broke a picture frame.” 

“Oh, he broke a picture frame, he says,” Jon parroted as he turned to his kit bag to retrieve the thread, needle and clamps he needed to close the wound. “You can tell me better than that.” 

“Ever since the police arrested Duke Rodriguez for the string of West Side murders, I have maintained his innocence,” Holmes began, his hand slowly clenching into a fist against the pain as Watson started in on clamping the gash on his arm. “I was convinced he was nothing more than a convenient fall guy. Someone close enough to the actual murderer that he was an easy target to plant evidence on. That was all.” 

“I’m sure you’re about to tell me the mud on his shoes means he’s never been up the West Side or something, aren’t you?” Jon said, shaking his head. Sherlock knew that this particular case had been resting heavy on Watson’s since they’d started on it. And he could read the concern in his face now, the same as he’d done when first explained to Jon that he’d doubted Rodriguez was the right man. 

“Actually, I just trust his alibi. I have Irregulars who can place him too far from the crime scene on the nights the murders were committed. It’s hardly enough to exonerate him, but it was enough to make me look harder at the police work. Besides, I had another suspect.”

“That’s that Cavanaugh fellow you were telling me about?” 

“Yes.” The word was a drawn out of Sherlock’s mouth with a hiss of disdain. 

The man in question, Frank Cavanaugh, seemed at first glance to be an unlikely suspect for a string of invasions and violent murders. He was a wealthy individual, the sort that came up with every advantage and didn’t squander it. In the right circles, he was well known as the owner and operator of the Musgrave Gallery, one of the most respected in Chelsea. His only connection to the police’s suspect Rodriguez was considerably insignificant, but that wasn’t the trail that Holmes had followed with put Cavanaugh on his short list of who he liked for the crime.

“I don’t know, Holmes,” Watson said, finishing with the stitches and going over the wound again with a few dabs on antiseptic. “I guess I can see though, that if I were a guy like Rodriguez, and I was breaking into all those nice places, I wouldn’t want to leave empty handed. But if it’s someone who’s already got all they need, guess it makes more sense.”

“That’s a point I hadn’t considered but you are, of course, very right about that.” Holmes was so distracted, going over the details of the case and the reasons he’d gone after Cavanaugh, that he barely even reacted to the sting of the disinfectant. It was the last crime scene, in fact, that sprang to the forefront of his mind. 

It was there, the scene which he and Watson had visited just two days prior, where Holmes had finally realised the method by which Cavanaugh selected his victims. It was also there that he thought the man made a mistake damning enough that it could lead to his capture. As, according to the housekeeper who’d discovered the body of her young bank manager employer, she swore she heard someone leaving through the rear entrance of the building, upsetting the trash cans as he fled. Cavanaugh had not managed to meticulously clean the scene or stage the body in his usual ways. He’d been interrupted; he’d made errors. 

While investigating the premises, Holmes discovered a card from the Musgrave Gallery, which lead to the realisation that the recently deceased had, hanging on their wall, a piece of art that had been sold through Musgrave. Upon further inspection, it seemed all the victims of the West Side murders had, in their homes, pieces that had at one time or another hung in Frank Cavanaugh’s gallery. The police used that bit of evidence to target Rodriquez, who worked as a delivery truck driver for the art house. 

“At the last home, the one where the killer was interrupted, I noticed something. There was an electronic charger of some kind plugged into the wall of the room where the body was found. That house, however, was meticulous, and I couldn’t imagine that the charger would be there unless it belonged to a device the victim used frequently.”

“And when it didn’t match the guy’s cell phone...”

“Then I believed it belonged to the murderer, exactly, Watson.” He shook his head. “With a bit of research, I was able to pull up that it belonged to a Hasselblad H4D 200MS digital camera. Not a cheap piece of equipment, not something Rodriguez could ever hope to afford.” 

“I think I remember some of the big shot journalists carrying around things like that in Afghanistan. So you’re thinking, expensive camera, guy who don’t rob his victims. The connection to the gallery -- all a that points at Frank Cavanaugh.” Watson continued, cleverly putting the rest together on his own. “So you broke into the guy’s house, what, looking for the camera? Is that how you cut your arm? Damn, Holmes, you should have asked me to come with you.” 

With Watson’s work complete, Holmes retracted his arm, and shifted to sit more comfortably in the kitchen chair. Jon wasn’t that far off the mark. He hadn’t been looking for the camera, exactly, but the _pictures_ that the murderer had undoubtedly taken. There was little reason else to bring a camera to a crime, after all. He assumed that there had to be a laptop, or memory disks stored somewhere at Cavanaugh’s office, and he’d broken in to find out. Unsurprisingly, the office itself was decorated with a number of framed canvases and other works of art. There was one, though, that stood out as different from the others. It was a small painting, mounted on the wall _within_ a glass shadow box that left a few inches of space on every side. Sherlock’s intention had been just to dismount the picture from the wall and search the frame, but when it wouldn’t budge he lost patience. His overcoat hadn’t protected him as well as he thought it might. 

And it was _protection_ that had kept him from reaching out that night for Watson’s help. Since the incident with the Reverend and the mercenaries that had threatened Jon’s life to obtain the evidence that Holmes had retrieved, Sherlock had become somewhat wary of including Jon when the suspect he was hounding down seemed particularly ruthless. It had nothing to do at all with the fact he’d willingly surrendered his discoveries to save Watson, either, he didn’t consider the man to be his Achilles’ Heel. He considered him a strength that now he couldn’t see himself living without. So he had taken this risk on his own, and indeed it was a greater one without Jon there to assist, but for Holmes that was still a better gamble than putting Jon too close to the firing line. Given the kind of criminal that Cavanaugh was -- that dark heart which resided in his chest, the fact he killed seemingly when the opportunity presented itself and without reason -- Holmes was sure he would not hesitate to take the life of someone who tried to stop him, without even a glint of the possibility of mercy. 

Carefully, and mindful of the work that Jon had just put into repairing his arm, Holmes reached into the front pocket of his jeans to pull out a small plastic bag containing a selection of large SD cards which he’d managed to retrieve from Cavanaugh’s office. “I broken in to retrieve these, which I intend to deliver to the lieutenant. Undoubtedly, there will be something on them that proves Rodriguez did not commit those crimes, and more than likely, there will be enough to fire up an investigation against Cavanaugh himself. I should call the Lieutenant.” 

“That don’t change the fact you should’a asked me to come with you,” Watson chastised before he reached into his own pocket to pull out his phone, offering it over to Holmes “I can help you, you know.” 

“Well what’s this, If it isn’t help?” ” Holmes smiled as he picked the phone off the table and used it to gesture at the bandages wrapped around his arm. But Sherlock could read the expression on Jon’s face as plainly as if the man had written a confession, and he understood. He knew that Jon hated the idea that he could have gotten himself killed almost as much as Lieutenant was going to hate the fact that Holmes hadn’t bothered to fill her in already. Their partnership was just that, a _partnership_ , and as concerned as he might be about putting Watson in a dangerous situation, it was without doubt that Jon was just as worried when he put _himself_ in one without assistance. Sherlock let his eyes fall to the keypad as he dialed. As the call connected and started to ring, he glanced back at Watson, and with a simple nod he promised: “Next time.”


End file.
